Spiritwalk by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online Page A

niece, see? Anyway, since she’s off traveling right now, I’m sort of looking after the place for her.” Off traveling. Right. Which was a very simple way of saying that she was in one of the Otherworlds with the Welsh bard Taliesin at the moment, undertaking her own bardic studies.
    “What do you do when you’re not here?” Button asked around a mouthful of omelet. “I mean, what kind of a job do you have?”
    “This is like a full-time job,” Blue said with a smile. “Or did you forget the size of this place?”
    Button smiled back. “That’s right. I felt like I should have a map just to get down here for breakfast.”
    “I’ll give you a tour later.”
    “Great.”
    They ate in silence then, until both their plates were clean. Button blotted up the last of her egg with a piece of toast, then leaned back in her chair.
    “So do you have a, you know, a girlfriend or anything?” she asked offhandedly.
    The question hit Blue with a flood of memories. For a moment he was back there at the end of that war between the druid Hengwr and his monstrous elf half. He could remember.... They were in the House, fighting off the enemy’s creatures, their own allies almost as strange. Norindian elves. The little manitou Pukwudji. A pair of wolves. Not to mention Tucker from the RCMP. Oh, they’d had it all—shaman magic and bardic magic and just plain guns and duking-it-out fisticuffs—but none of it had been enough. It had still taken Jamie’s life to end it.
    Only Jamie wasn’t dead, Blue never stopped trying to tell himself. Not like dead was supposed to be. But things just weren’t the same anymore anyway. How could they be? Everything had changed. They’d been like a family, only after the casualties there wasn’t much of a family left. Fred had died. And Sam. And Jamie.
    And when it was all over, Sara didn’t stay much in the House, so she left it to Blue to look after. And things didn’t work so well between him and Sally....
    “It didn’t work out the way it was supposed to,” Blue said softly.
    “I didn’t mean—” Button began.
    “That’s okay,” Blue said. “I want to tell you. The last woman I was close to—her name was Sally. Sally Timmons. We went through some bad shit that wasn’t her fault or mine—we just got caught up in what was like a war. I used to ride with the Devil’s Dragon and I wasn’t much of a human being. Man, I had the colors and the bike and the Dragon was everything. But the Dragon turned on me and I was on a downward slide until I ran into Jamie.
    “He pulled me up and brought me here and then he and Sara sort of showed me what it was like to be a real person—not just some animal cruising with a machine between his legs, see? Now, I’m not cutting down my bikes, Button—they’re like a lifeline for me, out there on the road. Sometimes they’re all that keeps me sane. But you can have the chopped-down Harley and not be an animal, you know?
    “So I was doing good, here in the House, learning things about myself, learning about how the world works and how I could fit into it—like sliding through it, not smashing my way through. By the time I met Sally I was doing pretty good. But then this trouble came up and I... Christ, Button, I scared the shit out of myself.
    “Now I know it was a time for that kind of thing—we had to fight or die, it was as simple as that—but by the time it was all over I just couldn’t handle the way I’d gone back so quickly to what I’d been. It was like the violence was always there inside me, just aching to get out. It’s like it’s always going to be sitting there inside me.
    “When that war was over and we got ourselves back home, I had a lot of trouble handling that. I hid it pretty good from most people—Christ, there weren’t many left to hide it from except for Sara and she was caught up with her new beau—but I couldn’t hide it from Sally. You can’t hide that kind of thing from someone when you’re